‘Civil Rights’ Leader: NBA Team ‘Too White’

Since racism is essentially a conspiracy theory (i.e., an unfalsifiable grand narrative), the more illogical the evidence, the more solid that evidence is perceived by the conspiracist, since it only proves the extent of the enemy’s cleverness and evil. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before you read a story like this, entitled “Are Minnesota Timberwolves Too White?”:

Minnesota Timberwolves fans may notice something different about their team this year. In a league in which American-born black players made up 75 percent of roster spots in 2011, the Timberwolves will have an opening-day roster comprising just 33 percent black players (five out of 15).

Some civil rights leaders in Minneapolis think so. Tyrone Terrell, chairman of St. Paul’s African American leadership council, told the Star-Tribune that he thinks the unbalanced roster could be seen as a ploy by the ownership to sell the team to a majority-white fan base.

‘How did we get a roster that resembles the 1955 Lakers?’ Terrell said to the Star-Tribune. ‘I think everything is a strategy. Nothing happens by happenstance.’

This may (read: may) constitute the first time someone has claimed that a basketball team is “too white.” Nevertheless, even if I am wrong about that, the phrase “too white” is becoming eerily commonplace these days. It seems this phrase has been mainstreamed over the past year or so. Racial demagoguery has been around for years, but I don’t ever recall reading “too white,” written with such blase, nothing-to-see-here glibness, until relatively recently.

Robert Wargas is a contributor to PJ Media. A native of Long Island, he was educated at the City University of New York and Yale University, and has also written for The Daily Telegraph of London and The Weekly Standard.
Outside of opinion writing, he has worked as a professional historian for a major research laboratory and university, documenting the history of biotechnology since the 1970s. He has also reported for both weekly and daily newspapers, including Newsday.
He maintains a personal blog/website at robertwargas.org. Follow him on Twitter @RobertWargas

Click here to view the 14 legacy comments

Click here to hide legacy comments

14 Comments, 12 Threads

1.
weo

Maybe the NBA needs a White Caucus in order to force the league to hire bad white basketball players who will then use their positions to slander the good black players and demand reparations for being discriminated against for the last 30 years.

And why, pray tell, is it AOK to have an NBA team that is 75% black but it’s not OK to have a team that’s 66% white? How exactly is one of those percentages deemed to be “racisssst” but the other one is not?

Related question: Why are almost all the white NBA players from Europe? What happened to white American players?

Kind of what I was going to say, which was, maybe the NBA is too black? After all, if black comprise about 13% of America’s population, and the NBA is 75% black, that is prima fascie evidence of discrimination against the rest of America. Hear, hear, we must demand affirmative action for whites, Hispanics and Asians in the NBA!! Where’s the EEOC when you need it?

Someone ask these bozos that blacks are only 13% of the population, and they are complaining that 33% of the Timberwolves being black is too small a percentage? Dudes, basketball does not belong to black America, so knock it off. A dude either has game or he doesn’t, geez.

Racism is not essentially a conspiracy theory; aside from individuals, it is either institutionalized in some form that constitutes a philosophical agreement among men, or it is not.

Having said that, 100% of the claims by the black political Left against whites or the GOP in this regard are in fact conspiracy theories. According to the Left, accusations of being “too white,” as you point out, are not only more common than ever before, but a de facto case to be made of racism, e.g., white privilege, if not outright conscious disdain for blacks. This is why a HuffPo article after Eastwood’s RNC appearance mentioned Carmel as being “frighteningly white.”

The truth of the matter is that every racial institution in America resides on the political Left, particularly the black Left. The continued presence of such institutions is based on the idea that institutional racism once practiced by whites has simply gone underground or continues as some form of informal yet structural racism. The idea is laughable, and so is Tyrone Terrell.

The Dem Party has firmly stated that black failure is actually white racism and they consider it some kind of science. Lord knows they have enough conspiracy theories centered mostly around robbing statistics of context to buttress their mad ideas. The Left has further found accusations of racism to be a convenient way to demonize any one who disagrees with their policies, e.g. immigration, school budgets, etc.

The whole ball of sad wax is practically a religion at outlets like MSNBC, the HuffPo and others, including Obama and his stupid minions like Eric Holder and the Congressional Black Caucus. There will always be racism but when reduced to individuals, no case can be made that whites are any more susceptible to racial disdain than anyone else. Ironically, to state that blacks are in fact less susceptible, is it’s own form of racial supremacy.

To add to your explanation: The tendency of all conspiracy theories is toward total absurdity. In the face of ever-mounting real-world refutations of the theory, the bar must continually be lowered as to what constitutes “evidence” so as to absorb all real-world events into the theory. This is why the NBA, of all places, is now being accused of being “too white.” Soon the NAACP will be accused of being “too white.”

From the story: “They will start the season with players from Russia, Montenegro, Spain and Puerto Rico, a total of five international players…”

The Timberwolves will have 5 black American born players, and 5 white American born players on their 15 man roster.

For anyone to call any NBA team “too white”, they don’t know what they are talking about. They could attempt to say “too international.”

It is easy to find gobs of non-black players on NBA rosters. Does anyone remember last year’s Linsanity, or the newest LA Laker, Canadian whiter-than-mayonnaise Steve Nash?

Face it, there are only so many roster spots on NBA teams. You cannot win in today’s game with mere talent. That talent has to be developed, and the best development is not happening in the US. Sure, you have new guys showing up each year from the college ranks, as 1-and-done players with only 1 season of college level play before they move on to the NBA. But Anthony “Unibrow” Davis caliber players are few and far between. So international players, with more than 1 year of experience beyond high school, are recruited because they can help a team win.

And it is a gigantic disservice to expend any “civil rights” concern over professional athletes. There are more brain surgeons in Minneapolis than professional athletes. The best chance for advancement and success in life is through cracking the books, not bouncing a ball. Instead of some stupid article over how “white” an NBA team is, how about some discussion about how poorly students are doing in our schools?